Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb
September 22 – October 7, 2015
Lela B. Njatin
Girl With A Whistle.
How much of me is in the others and how much of the others is in me
Opening: 22. 9. 2015 @ 8:00 p.m.
Including artist’s talk: Lela B. Njatin in conversation with Miroslav Mićanović and Lilijana Stepančič
Curator: Lilijana Stepančič
The exhibition offers a selection of works of Slovenian visual artist Lela B. Njatin produced between 2011 and 2014 which are examples of delegated performances, modern choreographic works, anti-monuments and body art. Their common thread permeates the principle of participatory art, which could be summarized in two questions, how much of me is in the others and how the others is in me. A series of works is connected by the image of a Girl With The Whistle, which is embodied in the artist in black long dress and most often with a whistle, kind of which is used in the sports. The exhibition includes a documentary film by Rudi Uran Shots in Kočevje (Streli v Kočevju), which records the performances by Lela B. Njatin.
The source of the performances Girl With A Whistle is in the eponymous excellent modernist public statue, in bronze, which in 1963 created the academic sculptor Stane Jarm. Made in a reduced realism of Western modernism of the fifties it represents the beginning of break with the socialist realist public monuments. In 1963, when Lela. B. Njatin was born, the monument was erected at the fountain on today's St. Jernej Square in Kočevje, thus in a small local town, which was like so many other cities in the former Yugoslavia marked by industrialization and accelerated urbanization.
Lela B. Njatin in her childhood lived in the block, standing on the same square with that statue. The Girl With A Whistle by Stane Jarm in her work came to life extracted from personal history, and has become a powerful medium of intimate memories and of collective of cultural meanings, the trigger for many of her Girls With A Whistle. Present Girls With A Whistle are an intangible substance built by the artist with the cooperation of participants, but deconstructed or upgraded from work to work, so that it sets in a variety of specific real situations. They open cultural, sociological and political issues such as: how to constitute the social power and cultural paradigm; how personally become a general history; how to transform the art canons and how function processes of institutionalization. She does not talk about specific intimate things. Rather, she speaks indirectly, with strong, but not monumental, sensual charge, which permeates and indicate that they are in the background of intense intimate events.
Her works continue the tradition which constitutes the European historical avant-garde at the beginning and the global neo-avantgarde practices in the second half of the last century. It must be said that works of Lela B. Njatin are not interested in realizing cultural gesture, attributed to Marcel Duchamp, who talks about the institutional role of the gallery as a space that creates art. It is closer to Duchamp's deconstruction and subversion of images. In conceptualism she is nearer to utopia, which constitutes art as a strong social substance that is now so rare in contemporary art. To this tradition she adds turnover that relates to existentialism, Heidegger and Hegel. This assigns a strong philosophical component to her works.
She says the following: "In arts, the representation of reality is an attempt to dig deeper into the reality of the essence. This attempt is a promise that art will give the truth about the world. It is not my authentic personal conviction, but of the culture in which I was born."
This is why the questions How much of me is in the others and how much of the others is in me, are excellent reflection of her artistic credo.
Lela B. Njatin (1963) is a publicist, writer and visual artists. Between 1975 and 1985 she was a member of the art collectives of conceptual and mail arts Westeast, Maj 75 and Signalizam. Since 2010 she has been working with interdisciplinary projects, installations, performing and participatory art, anti-monuments and fine art. Her first exhibition was DASEVIDIDASENEKIDELA in Likovni salon, Kočevje (1980), whilst her first solo exhibition entitled I Didn’t Want to Know, but I Have Since Come to Know was held in the Vžigalica Gallery/MGML in Ljubljana (2013). She has written several literary works, including Nestrpnost (1988), Velikanovo srce (1996), Zakaj je babica jezna (2011). She participated at the City of Women's international panel on women's literature (1995) and as a dramaturge in the Mindful of Loneliness with a solo poetic short piece Loneliness (2003).
Miroslav Mićanović is Croatian writer, poet and publisher. His publishing house Naklada MD in 1997 published a book, Nestrpnost (Intolerance) by Lela B. Njatin.
Lilijana Stepančič is curator of contemporary art from Ljubljana.
More information:
Janka Vukmir, janka@scca.hr
Institute of Contemporary Art
Trg kralja Tomislava 20, 10000 Zagreb
T: +385 1 88 97 098
M: +385 91 61 99 454
The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the City of Women and Kultura 21, Slovenia
Financial support: Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, City of Zagreb, Institute for Contemporary Art
Photo by Rudi Uran
Strelišče. Plati plasti; 21. 6. 2015 v Pokrajinskem muzeju Kočevje.
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